With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
On border and immigration issues, the record of Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is not lengthy but diverges little from positions associated with liberal members of the Democratic Party. Walz condemned Trump-era policies that harmed migrants’ rights and, as governor, championed efforts to integrate refugees and the undocumented population.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, along with Walz, is seeking to “lean into” the border and migration issue during the campaign, seeking a line of attack against Republican nominee Donald Trump for Trump’s February effort to kill “border deal” legislation in the Senate. By doing so, the candidates are endorsing that legislation’s limits on asylum access at the border, as well as a June 5 Biden administration rule that bans most asylum access between border ports of entry. That rule has driven migration to lows not seen since 2020, but comes with a sharp cost in denials of protection to people who may need it, according to a new report from several U.S. groups.
The Atlantic published a deeply reported look at migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region, concluding that cracking down on migration, while failing to reduce it, makes it more costly and benefits criminal groups who dominate smuggling. Panama deported 28 people from the Darién aboard a commercial flight to Colombia, the first big deportation within the framework of a deal with the United States to facilitate more repatriations. Darién Gap migration was a key subject as the commander of U.S. Southern Command paid a visit to Panama.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Tim Walz’s record on the border and migration
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris presented her chosen running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, on August 6. The vice-presidential nominee, who served in the House of Representatives for 12 years, does not have a lengthy record on border and migration issues, but evidence shows little divergence from what have been standard liberal Democratic positions.
- Twitter user Tim Young (@Young25Tim) posted screenshots of tweets from Walz, going back to 2018, criticizing the Trump administration’s family separation policy, opposing Trump’s use of Defense Department funds to build border wall segments, endorsing a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers,” and affirming that “Minnesota is stronger because of our immigrant communities.”
- As governor, Rafael Carranza reported at the Arizona Republic, Walz expanded drivers’ licensing regardless of immigration status, expanded in-state college tuition to undocumented students, and expanded undocumented residents’ access to the state’s subsidized health insurance program.
- In 2018, at the lowest point of the Trump administration’s family separations policy, then-Rep. Walz was one of 195 House members who co-sponsored the “Keep Families Together Act.”
- In 2015 Walz supported legislation backing stricter screening of refugees, but the New York Times reported that he has since changed this position.
- In 2008, following a visit to El Paso, he called “on Congress to increase funding for more Border Patrol agents, security cameras, technology and K-9 training,” MPR News reported at the time.
Republican opponents briefly sought to attack Walz for comments made in a late July CNN interview, in which he was facetiously making a point about the futility of border wall construction: “I always say, let me know how high it is. If it’s 25 feet, then I’ll invest in the 30 foot ladder factory. That’s not how you stop this.”
Asylum restrictions reduce migration, increase reports of endangerment
In the same interview, Walz endorsed the “border deal” bill that Donald Trump successfully urged Senate Republicans to kill in February 2024. That echoes the Harris campaign’s plan to adopt tough talk on border security, as a Reuters analysis put it. As they lean into the border and migration issue—which analysts often view as a political liability for them—Harris and Walz plan to center their attacks on Donald Trump for pushing to defeat the “ Border Act,” the product of a bipartisan negotiation that failed to pass the Senate in early February.
That bill included a few immigration reform priorities, but most notably included Republican-friendly provisions like increasing ICE detention capacity and, most controversially, creating a “Border Emergency Authority” blocking asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border at times of heavier migration.
On June 5, despite the lack of legislation to underpin it, the Biden administration put in place something like the “Border Emergency Authority”: a June 5 rule severely limiting access to the U.S. asylum system for people who cross the border between ports of entry. (see WOLA’s June 7, 2024 Border Update). The rule states that, should the weekly average of migrant apprehensions rise above 2,500 per day, migrants who cross without a port-of-entry appointment will be refused the right to ask for asylum unless they can prove a very high standard of credible fear. Asylum remains suspended unless the weekly apprehensions average drops below 1,500 per day for 3 weeks.
The rule has caused a sharp short-term drop in migration at the border (see WOLA’s August 2, 2024 Border Update), beyond drops since January caused mainly by a Mexican government crackdown on migration transiting Mexico. Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants between ports of entry dropped below 1,500 on August 4, roughly equal to the daily number of appointments available at ports of entry using the CBP One smartphone app (1,450 plus a handful of “walk-ups”).
The weekly average “is inching towards the 1,500 [per day] threshold that would deactivate President Biden’s partial asylum ban,” noted Camilo Montoya-Gálvez of CBS News. Over the previous 10 days, four Border Patrol officials told the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli on August 3, migrant apprehensions had ranged from 1,670 to 2,500 per day.
Due to the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and Mexico’s crackdown on migrants in transit, Tijuana’s migrant shelters are well below capacity, municipal migration official Enrique Lucero told Border Report.
At the Wall Street Journal, Michelle Hackman and Santiago Perez explained how what they call Mexico’s “chutes and ladders” approach—busing tens of thousands of migrants from northern border areas to the country’s south— has combined with the June 5 rule to cause migrant arrivals at the border to plummet.
Experience with border and migration crackdowns over the past 10 years shows that cracking down has only short-term effects, with drops in migration usually bottoming out after a few months then increasing as migrants and smugglers adjust.

It is too early to tell whether the post-June 5 decline has bottomed out yet, though weekly tweets from the chiefs of Border Patrol’s San Diego, Tucson, and Del Rio sectors, plus El Paso’s municipal “dashboard,” show very slight increases in migrant encounters for the most recently reported week, compared to the immediately preceding week.
Even as the Harris-Walz campaign defends the June 5 rule, its denial of asylum access continues to generate human rights and humanitarian concerns. Six national and border-region organizations released an August 7 report finding that U.S. border agents are frequently deporting people who express fear of return, even though the rule states that they are still entitled to credible fear interviews (at a much higher standard of fear). In some cases, the rule’s uneven implementation is causing families to be separated, as some members get granted fear interviews while others are deported.
Too often, the report states, Border Patrol agents who refuse to honor fear claims are doing so with false and insulting statements. Examples include “there is no asylum anymore; we don’t care”; “there is no asylum and whatever happened to you is not our problem”; or “what if I went to your house and entered without permission? You’re entering my country without permission.”
Nineteen Democratic members of Congress signed a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other officials voicing serious concerns about the rule’s humanitarian impact. The letter notes that the rule “forces individuals to wait in danger [in northern Mexico] while facing active threats to their safety—in violation of U.S. law and international treaty obligations.”
As migrants find that a months-long wait in Mexico for a CBP One appointment is the only clear path to the U.S. asylum system, Edgardo Molina, technical coordinator of the Guatemala-Honduras Binational Migration Project, told Honduras’s Criterio of a “worrying trend.” He cited an “increase in stationary migrants, i.e. families who stay in Mexico waiting to cross to the United States and then return to Honduras out of desperation after six or seven months trying to cross.”
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is making an adjustment to the CBP One app feature that allows asylum seekers in Mexican territory to make appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Since the feature debuted in January 2023, it has been available only to people inside Mexico from Mexico City northward. That geolocation restriction is to expand: soon, people will also be able to use CBP One to make appointments while in Mexico’s southernmost states.
Panama carries out Darién Gap deportations with U.S. backing
The Atlantic’s September 2024 issue leads with a deeply reported feature about migration through the Darién Gap, by Caitlin Dickerson, who won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. For this 8,000-word narrative, Dickerson walked the entire length of the treacherous Darién trail straddling Colombia and Panama. She spoke to many migrants and officials about the untenable situation there: Panama measured 520,085 people transiting the Darién Gap in 2023, and the count stood at 216,005 as of July 21, 2024.
Dickerson concluded that attempting to deter migrants by making the trip more miserable does not reduce migration, but it does result in more death and suffering. “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.”
On August 7 Panama’s migration authority deported, on a commercial flight, 28 Colombian citizens detained in the Darién Gap region. Eleven of them, the agency said, had criminal records in Colombia. The operation took place “in support of the U.S.-Panama memorandum of understanding,” read a statement, referring to the U.S. government’s recent commitment to help fund Panama’s increased deportations of migrants from the Darién.
Reuters reported in early July that the U.S. State Department has allocated $6 million to help Panama carry out aerial deportations from the Darién. In mid-July, Panama’s recently inaugurated president, José Raúl Mulino, said that his government would only deport migrants if they agree to voluntary repatriation.
The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, was in Panama for a two-day visit this week. Gen. Richardson met with President Mulino and other officials “to discuss bilateral security cooperation and strategies to contain the unprecedented irregular migration through the Darién jungle,” Agénce France Presse reported.
Panama’s border force reported arresting 15 people who allegedly helped smuggle Chinese migrants through the Darién Gap through a so-called “VIP route” that is more costly but involves less walking through the jungle (about two days).
Before they arrive in the Darién region, migrants from China are facing new obstacles to northward migration, like a suspension of visa-free arrivals to Ecuador, the Wall Street Journal reported. As a result, many “are now attempting to start their overland journeys from as far away as La Paz, Bolivia, roughly 7,000 miles and nine border crossings from Tijuana.”
Other news
- Mother Jones published a package of articles about “the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment.” The package includes Erin Siegal McIntyre on impunity for sexual violence within the force, including a 2019 rape at the Border Patrol Academy; Lauren Markham on border technologies and threats to civil liberties; Emily Green on the force’s pro-Trump politicization, led by its union; Isabela Dias on the Trump campaign’s mass-deportation plans; and Ian Gordon and Melissa Lewis on the extent of Border Patrol’s jurisdiction and law enforcement powers, including in areas far from borders. The University of New Mexico radio station interviewed McIntyre about her sexual violence investigation. She said she obtained a CBP dataset of 186 sexual misconduct allegations over 20 years, but it has glaring omissions, including high profile cases, “so it’s clear you can’t trust the government’s numbers.”
- The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson, Eduardo Porter of the Washington Post editorial board, and former officials at the Center for American Progress published analyses of Kamala Harris’s record on hemisphere-wide migration policy. The CAP authors touted the success of Harris’s approach to “root causes” of migration from Central America, while Porter questioned its relevance to larger U.S. border and migration challenges. Dickerson pointed out that people’s often agonized decisions to migrate rarely have anything to do with the current state of U.S. immigration policy. At MNSBC, the Cato Institute’s David Bier urged Harris to run on a platform of defending immigrants.
- DHS has temporarily suspended the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela due to suspected fraud in some of the applications for U.S.-based sponsors. The program allows up to a combined 30,000 citizens of these countries to receive a two-year documented status in the United States without having to come to the U.S.-Mexico land border. Due in part to this pathway’s availability, Border Patrol apprehensions of these countries’ citizens fell to just 3,349 at the U.S.-Mexico border in June, down from a high of 84,208 in December 2022. If the suspension is prolonged, there is some probability that this number will increase again.
- A New Yorker feature by Jack Herrera profiled Father Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest dedicated to assisting migrants in the violence-plagued border city of Reynosa, Mexico, across from McAllen. The area has seen a spike in already-high levels of migrant kidnappings since mid-2023. “As the country turns against migrants, Strassburger’s work has become more fraught.”
- A study in the journal Trauma Surgery and Acute Care “identified 597 patients injured while crossing the US-Mexico border wall representing 38 different countries” in 2021 and 2022. Their mean age was 32 and 75 percent were male. Two-thirds were Mexican, followed by citizens of Peru, India, El Salvador, Cuba, and Jamaica. The study concludes: “The increased volume of trauma associated with the US-Mexico border wall is a humanitarian and health crisis.”
- CBP posted three notices on August 6 about deaths involving agency personnel:
- A January 24 pursuit in New Mexico, near El Paso, that ended in a rollover crash that killed a woman from Guatemala.
- The death of a newborn baby following delivery by caesarean section, after the February 25 apprehension of an eight-months pregnant woman from Angola near Lukeville, Arizona. The mother was taken to a hospital, where doctors “detected a defect in the fetus’ heartbeat.”
- A March 6 pursuit in Lukeville, Arizona during which two passengers exited a vehicle moving at about 45 miles per hour. A man from Mexico died of his injuries.
- Police in Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua encountered 10 migrants from Sudan and Morocco who had just been released by their criminal kidnappers after ransom was paid. They said they endured torture, and were taken to a shelter.
- Writing in the Los Angeles Times after participating in a borderland humanitarian water drop, novelist Laura Pritchett lamented the “proximity principle,” which reduces people’s empathy for suffering—like that of migrants risking death in the desert—that they do not witness firsthand.
- The frequency of ICE flights removing migrants to other countries dropped a bit from June to July, reverting “to a more typical level of 6.3 per weekday from the one-month evaluation to 7.2 in June, and closer to the prior 6-month average of 6.5,” according to the latest monthly report from Tom Cartwright at Witness on the Border. Two-thirds of flights went to Mexico (16 of 146 in July), El Salvador (12), Guatemala (46), and Honduras (24). Colombia (17) and Ecuador (18) also saw double-digit numbers of ICE removal flights.
- As Venezuela’s regime deepens repression following false claims of victory in July 28 elections, analyses at Bloomberg, the Center for Engagement and Democracy in the Americas, and the American Conservative relayed expectations that migration from Venezuela is poised to increase. A leader of the country’s political opposition told the Miami Herald that a new wave of migrants fleeing the country is imminent.
- At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque revealed that CBP is keeping asylum seekers’ genetic profiles in “a massive criminal investigations database” without their knowledge, even when those asylum seekers are deported or expelled from the border. “The program disproportionately targets people of color,” said Stevie Glaberson of the Center on Privacy and Technology, which has investigated the program.
- “We can’t have border control without gun control,” Jean Guerrero wrote at the New Republic, noting the southbound flow of U.S. weapons to organized crime in nations to the south from which large numbers of people migrate. Guerrero called on Kamala Harris “and every major Democrat” to “beat the drum about this as often as the Republican Party spews hate against immigrants.”
- InsightCrime noted that CBP’s largest-ever fentanyl seizure, 453 kilograms (999 pounds) from a U.S. citizen crossing the Lukeville, Arizona port of entry on July 1, happened despite the Sinaloa Cartel’s widely cited order to stop producing the drug in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. “The size of this seizure,” equivalent to 7 percent of CBP’s entire border-wide fentanyl haul during the first 9 months of fiscal 2024, “suggests that fentanyl continues to be produced in other areas of Mexico,” like the border states of Baja California and Sonora, reported InsightCrime’s Henry Shuldiner.
- A “caravan” that departed Mexico’s southern border about three weeks ago is now in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca. Exhausted, many are receiving medical attention in the town of San Pedro Tapanatepec.
- In Starr County, in south Texas, landowner Florentino Luera has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent CBP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from seizing his land to build a segment of border wall. The Biden administration is building a stretch of wall in Starr County because it is compelled to do so by appropriations legislation passed during the Trump administration.
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) installed a third layer of concertina wire barrier along the Rio Grande in El Paso, EFE reported. Pastor Francisco González of the Somos Uno por Juárez Shelter Network said that the additional barrier, by making crossing more complicated, “opens the door for the people who are dedicated to human trafficking, the so-called coyotes, to make a killing.”